A Granta Best Young British Novelist

'I loved this book' JULIA ARMFIELD

'Exhilarating' MONICA HEISEY

'Astonishing' ANDREA LAWLOR

'Should be on everyone's summer reading list' iNEWS

A powerful, sensual novel of the forbidden love between a young woman and the headmaster's wife, unfolding across a single a heatwave summer.

In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of 'matron'.

There she meets Mrs S, the headmaster's wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity.